Windows Live Family Safety Breaks Internet

Posted in Computers by Jarrett on 12/8/2008 12:50:44 AM - CST

The current version of Windows Live Family Safety may hose up your Vista machine. I recently installed this on a brand new Vista machine as I was installing Live Photo Gallery and it broke internet access and video streaming to the Xbox (via the Vista Media Center Extender)

If you try to uninstall Windows Live Family Safety, it will not fix anything. At one point, I saw the following error:

the Family Safety service has been disabled. Please ask the administrator for this computer to enable it. Until that's done, you will not be able to browse the Internet

I was logged in as an admin and I tried to disable the service, but since I uninstalled it, there was nothing to disable. Something was left behind by this program that was blocking port 80. I disabled the firewall and it still wouldn’t work.

Please note that I never signed the program into Live or enabled it before I uninstalled it. I don't know why it would start blocking the internet without asking me. My advice: Avoid installing Windows Live Family Safety

The only way I could fix this was re-installing Vista. I'm posting this in hope's that others will avoid this program.